Monday, December 31, 2012

On Friday I answer a reader question about my working environment and schedule. There were lots of pictures and words, so if you missed it you might want to head over there and check it out. I mentioned in the post that there was a last minute addition to my home office/working area and I wanted to share that with you today. Well... I will share with you a heavily blurred image of it since I don't want to get into any trouble.

Previously, when working on monster stuff I would draw with my paper in my lap (I have drawn this way for ever it feels) or I would draw or paint at the opposite end of the desks from my computer. This has worked out fine until recently when my needs have begun to out grown this arrangement. Something larger and more ergonomic was needed to better facilitate my needs to paint and draw. Santa (my awesome wife) provided just want I was looking for this year and I have put it to immediate use...

The new traditional work station for all my drawing and painting needs.

I have never been comfortable or like to work at an easel, a flat supported surface has always been my work environment of choice. I am sure the fact I have not painted traditionally until a year a go has a lot to do with that! This new drafting table allows plenty of room for lighting, reference, and for the actual piece I am working on. Still breaking it in, but I have successfully completed my first project at it and it has worked out marvelously. I don't know how I would have done it with out this addition to the office. Thanks, wife!!!

HOLY COW, this was the last post of 2012! How time flies! I will be back here on Wednesday for another exciting day on the blog and my first post of 2013! Until then...

Friday, December 28, 2012

A while back I asked readers of this blog to submit questions they would like me to answer about art, working as an artist, or anything else relating to the industry. I received several great questions and it is long over due to start answering them. Starting things off, we have a question from Ashley…

Ashley asks:

"As a commercial freelance artist who has two kids (with a third on the way) I can't work full time but I am curious to know what a typical work day looks like for you. Where do you work and what does your daily schedule look like? How many projects can you do in a week/month?"

Thanks for the great question and I hope my answer will be helpful and insightful. I have mentioned this before here on the blog and I talked about it in more detail at Illuxcon during my lecture on 'Getting Serious', I do maintain a day job that allows me the opportunity to also work as a fantasy illustrator. The quick answer is that I work a 40 hour a week job as a designer and digital artist for a educational design house and I work a 40 hour a week (or more) as a fantasy illustrator. This is a choice that I have made, though at the beginning I really didn't know what I was getting into. But then again, when it comes to fantasy illustration, if we knew what we were getting into I am not sure how many of us would be in the industry!

Let's start off with what my days look like… Generally speaking, I work 7 days a week to some degree and most of my days are 17 - 18 hours long from waking up to falling asleep. I do make time for my wife, my friends, mountain biking three times a week, personal art time, and a little time here and there it catch up on sleep. I wake up at 7 am five days a week and arrive at my office ready to work by 8 am. I take an hour lunch, if I am eating alone I spend most of my lunch drawing on my own work, if I have lunch with friends I gladly ignore the drawing. I work generally till 5 pm, though a couple times a year due to deadlines my day job requires additional time. My wife works nights as an ER nurse and our schedules overlap in the mornings and evenings. This allows me several nights a week to an empty house where I can focus on working with only the cats to distract me. I generally start working on illustration work in the evenings between 6 pm and 8 pm, depending on what else is going on and I work until around midnight. At the latest I am asleep by 1 am. It all begins again at 7 am and this is usually repeated through the entire work week. I sleep in on the weekends whenever possible. This is a hard schedule to maintain, and I do so out of choice and love of the monsters.

As far as my working environment goes I have two very different offices for the two jobs I have. I have my day job office where I do my educational based work and I have my home office where I make my monster illustrations. I have some photos of both with some helpful diagrams to explain what you are looking at. Lets start things off with my day job office and finish up with the home office…

Daytime office

Daytime office wall

This office has a glass front, so you can see into it like a display room. My office is usually a stopping point when clients or university employees are brought through for meetings and tours. I on the second floor so the view out the window is nice… which is why I sit with my back to it so that I am not distracted.

Nighttime office

Nighttime office

As you can see, my two offices are a little different depending on the work I am doing there. Looking at them now, it seems like their appearances are reversed to what you would expect. Originally, my home office was in our guest room, but I would be back there for hours on end and the wife wouldn't see me. We decided to move my work area out into the main area of the house and it has worked out very well. We had already divided the long room with a cough, so I just set up behind the cough and I can spend time with the wife and still work. The set up for the home office has changed over the years to better suit my needs. In fact, it has changed again since preparing to write this post. There has been a new addition, and I will share it with you on Monday since I have not had time to add it to this post.

Now the tough part of this question, how long does it actually take me to make a painting. This is tough because I never have the chance to just sit down and constantly work on a painting. I have my day job and other activities that separate my painting time into little blocks in the evenings and weekends. I will give you a general break down of the amount of time it takes me to do any given step of the process…

I have had the chance to sit down and work only on illustration a couple times this year and this has given me a better understanding of how fast… or slow I work. I was able to finish a fully detailed isolated figure illustration in a single day of work and I was able to complete a quarter page with background in a day and a half. But having the time to just sit and focus on the painting for any longer then 4 - 5 hours is a rarity for me. I do get longer periods on the weekend, sometimes 10 - 12 hours and I can complete most of a painting in that time. My rule of thumb is that the painting part of the process takes 1 - 3 days worth of time. Sometimes it is longer sometimes it is less. As always, the more time I put into the thumbnails and drawing the less time I find the final painting taking me. I have found that allowing time between the thumbnail, the drawing, and the final painting allows me the chance to look more objectively at the piece at each stage of the process and allows me to catch potential issues that will need to be addressed. I also try to allow time between when I finish the painting and when I turn it in so that I can have a fresh look at it before I send it to the client, just to make sure I didn't miss anything.

As a rule I work on one painting at a time. I will work on all the thumbnails and drawings all at the same time, but when it comes to the paintings I will work on one until it is done and then begin on the next. I also work on the paintings in the order the client assigned them to me in the art order - a little superstition that I have always had. I will move entire assignments around in my work schedule depending on deadline though, but I do like to work on them in the order they come to me. This first come first serve work flow has allowed me to not make any scheduling mistakes or miss any deadlines.

My schedule is pretty packed and planned out for at least a month or two in advance. This does make it difficult to work with new clients, clients with a really tight turn around on deadlines, and surprise emergency pick up assignments… but I do my best to make things work for everyone. 99% of the time I err on the side of caution when it comes to accepting work and I have had to learn the hard skill of saying 'NO'. I have passed on some really exciting projects that I have waited my entire life to work on because I knew I would just not have enough time to take them. This really sucks, to put it bluntly, but producing substandard work or missing a deadline is worse for me. I am usually working on anywhere between 1 and 4 pieces at any given time. I aim to have 1 to 3 finished paintings each month. This allows me some little bit of a life outside of working while still allowing me to make my monsters. That said… I have 13 paintings to produce over the next month. This should be interesting!

I hope this answers all of the questions and addresses all of the topics. If there are any additional questions on this topic or if anyone would like anything explained further, please feel to leave them in the comment section below. Also, if you have any other questions for me please feel free to send them my way!

That is all for another exciting week on the blog, see you back here on Monday! Until then...

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

On Friday I shared with you the design and redesign that I created for the Lissa (Ashanti) Demon for the seventh season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. There was one variation to this demon that went as far as the drawing phase, though I am not sure if it was ever shown to production, or if the design was killed in house. For this variant, I was apparently designing the Ood of Doctor Who a good 4 years before their time... OR I was simply drawing something with a face full of tentacles because I thought it would be neat. Whatever it was, here is the rejected Lissa Demon design...

RAWR! I am a rejected design that may or may not have been seen by production...

Okay... it is a demon with a tear away face with drippy tentacles... and not a whole lot else going on... like interesting forms and details. As I have mentioned previously with my redesigns, the one big fault my old work (besides being old work) is that there was not a lot of time and thought given to the forms and details. Things feel flat and simple. Granted, I was still very much learning as I went in the less then hospitable environment with not a lot of time to actually get my thoughts onto paper. Not that I would ever make excuses for my old work, it is old, I have moved on and thankfully, I hope, I have moved my skill set along as well. Having made some time, I revisited this abandoned variant and came up with something... newer...

I will be completely honest, if production would have seen this new version they probably would have rejected it in second for it being 'dirty'. Oh well. They had a thing about things being 'dirty' or at least things being 'dirty' in their heads. No matter what the past would have said about this, I wanted to make something better for me now. Going back to the idea that since this was a severed head it could be anything tried to push it a little further with something weird and inhuman, while keeping the original face tentacle action in some way. I think... I HOPE it is a more interesting and weird monster. More time and thought was put into it this time around, no matter the case!

That is all for another exciting Wednesday on the blog, see you back here on Friday! Until then...

Many moons ago the idea for this years' holiday card came to me and I sketched it down on a postit note so I would not forget when it came time to actually make the card. This was attached to the bottom of my monitor so I was reminded every day not to forget that nothing says 'Happy Holidays' like an apocalypse...

Friday, December 21, 2012

You of course remember the Lissa (Ashanti) Demon from episode 7, First Date, from season 7 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, right? Any good Buffy fan would, right? I barely recall the dang thing and I designed it. So that everyone is on the same page, this is a Lissa (Ashanti) Demon...

So this is apparently a demon... until that moment when the head leaves the body then look out. cause it is gonna get weird. Weird like this...

OH THE HORROR!!! Bad screen grabs!!!

For some reason my archives lack an image of the completed and painted Lissa Demon head, which is a real shame since it actually looked really cool. The interwebs were no help until I remembered Buffy is streaming on Netflix and I went and gathered some bad screen grabs from the episode. Not the best, but you get the idea.

Now that all that is out of the way... I was able to find some time to take a fresh pass at another monster that I designed while working on Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire series. This time around the Lissa Demon was the lucky winner. Here is my original design for the Lissa Demon from 2002...

This is one of those classic moments I had way too many of when I worked in LA. The design could be anything... ANYTHING... because the finished product is a severed head and will never be a makeup or have to conform to human anatomy. I then was given about a hour, maybe a little more to come up with new and exciting ideas... and of course my brain shut down. The above drawing was the best of the three to four sketches I was able to work up in the allotted time. Looking back on it now, it actually is not too bad and while it could have been pushed more, it was totally fine for the situation. It is what it is... It needed to be a crazy demon head that had moments before been a person of some fame who had been brought on the show as a guest star. Done and done.... RAWR... or something. Moving right a long to 10 years later I attempted to update this design with something newer...

To be honest, I am not happy with how this drawing turned out. I mentioned on Wednesday that I have been in a funk when it has come to my personal work and the last couple pieces have failed to hit the mark in my opinion. I think this piece was chief among them. Making the time to work on this was hard to big with, my schedule has been rather tight lately, which I am sure has let to some of the issues with the piece. This piece took weeks to complete with a little time being spent here and there... this is way to long for a piece like this to take. In the process I think I lost control of it. Had big ideas for it, but I think it got sidetracked more then once. Oh well... can't win them all and hopefully I am back on the right track with my drawing.

Going through my archives I did find a lot of pictures of the demon head as it was being sculpted. I was not the sculpture on this, but I thought I would share the images all the same. Neat stuff...

RAWR! I am made of clay!

That is all for another exciting day on the blog, see you back here on Monday! Until then...

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

A quick one today, much going on and little time to dally on the interwebs. I am in the midst of working a few humanoid monsters and they needed to have some personality. While they are all well on the way to having more then enough personality I still wanted to make sure I had my brain around the aspect of it all. I spent some time this past weekend working on a study from a photo I took on Thanksgiving. This is how it turned out...

Been feeling a little off lately when it has come to my personal drawings. As the events of this year quickly wrap up making time in my schedule to draw for myself has become a little difficult. Been feeling a little rushed while drawing and it has resulted in just a few balled up pieces of paper and some drawings that just didn't turn out they way I felt they should have. This drawing was servings two purposes, one was to work on giving a monster some personality and the second purpose was to shake the funk off and really give myself some time to draw for myself to make something I am happy with. I think this piece was successful on both. I did have great reference to work with! RAWR!

That is all for another exciting Wednesday on the blog, see you back here on Friday! Until then...

Monday, December 17, 2012

Christmas has arrived early from the Realms. The December issue of Dragon magazine posted today and I am happy to now share a piece that I contributed to this issue. Dragon #418 features the article, Bestiary: Ye Olde Creature Catalogue, and as you may have guessed, there are monsters in this article! I was tasked with updating the wily and weird Decapus, and this is how it turned out...

Those not familiar with the Decapus, on the surface, it was a rather silly monster from the early days of D&D. It has ten tentacles, so it was not a lost cause and combined with its huge mouth filled with long yellow teeth it was well on its way to saying "RAWR" with the best of them. It was a fun challenge taking a monster that was by current standards a little silly and fleshing it out into something more fierce and formidable. Hopefully I did the original justice while bringing my own elements to it. I sure had fun making this monster all the same! As a side note, the tree the Decapus clings to is based on a tree along my mountain biking route. Be sure to stop back by the blog in the coming weeks to see the process that went into updating the Decapus! As always, I would like to thank Kate Irwin for involving me on this project and for her art direction!

That is all for another exciting Monday on the blog, see you back here on Wednesday! Until then...

Friday, December 14, 2012

I have for you another drawing that is fresh from the drawing table.
This time around it is a Ixitxachitl! "I" slowly but surely is running out, there are still monster to choose from, but "I" was never a letter with a lot of options. When my other choices are the Invisible Stalker (blank sheet of paper) or the Irish Deer, it makes picking the Ix... Ixit... Ix... ah, um... Ixitxachitl (ish-it-SHACH-itl or iks-it-ZATCH-i-til) a lot easier. I present to you my version of
a Ixitxachitl…

Intelligent, aquatic, manta ray like creatures... check, check, and check... what's not to like? For me, a lot of that. I just never could get behind these guys as a monster as described. They are intelligent, poses magic abilities, have societies, enslave creatures to use as labor... and yet they are just manta rays. I would get it if they had telekinetic powers but they never seemed to have anything going on except for a mouth full of teeth and a barbed tail. Seems like they need some arms or something. I might be a speciesist, but you really need to have some arms in my book (or crazy mind powers) to have the kind of life style described for the Ixitxachitl. In the end, my biggest change to the Ixitxachitl is to give it some much needed arms (IMHO) and for me, it becomes a much larger and more believable threat. This is why the dolphin will never be a threat to human and why we will eventually have to stop the octopus upraising of 3245...

Wednesday, December 12, 2012

It is one of those days... weeks... AND months. I have some great questions from readers I need to answer... well, I
need to make the time to answer them and get together the content
associated with them. I have new work coming out soon... but I am still
waiting. I have been super busy drawing and painting lately... on work I
won't be able to share for a while.

What I am getting at with all this rambling? As the year comes to a close it can get a little hard to stay on top of everything, especially this ole blog that gets updated thrice weekly. The backlog of already written and created content is running on empty and there can be a bit of a scramble to keep up with things here. Looking at the blog this morning I just didn't know what I wanted to do with it so I decided to share some recent monster... er, I mean animal reference I gathered over the weekend at the local natural history and historical museum. I hope you find them as helpful as I do! Enjoy...

Monday, December 10, 2012

I received a really nice surprise from the blog last week. Jan Groeneveld sent me a link to a miniature he made based on one of the pieces that I made for the Halls of Undermountain, the Darktentacles. Readers of the blog will know that I have designed my share of minis and that I love just about everything about minis. It is incredibly humbling and a huge honor that Jan took the time and effort to make a mini of one of my monsters. I could not wait to share it with you here on the blog. To make it better, Jan sent me additional images so I could really show off the mini...

Darktentacles mini by Jan Groeneveld and his friend Hilko

Now that is a lot of tentacles! RAWR!

Another shot to show off their great work!

This is the image that Jan originally sent me. SO COOL!

Jan sent me a really nice email and told me about the creation of the miniature. I hope he won't mind if I share it with you here...

"I play Pen & Paper RPGs for over twenty years now, being the DM most
of the time. At the moment my playgroup plays D&D 4th Edition and
we wanted to try out (the excellent!) "Halls of Undermountain". I have
quite a large collection of prepainted D&D miniatures and so
normally I have a fitting miniature for every monster/NPC the heroes may
meet. When my collection doesn't yield a needed adversary, I
either buy one or - if there isn't one to find - I just build one
myself.

This was the case for two monsters from "Halls of
Undermountain". The Crawling Claws were not difficult (get two sets of
minotaur hands from Warhammer Fantasy, glue to base, get ghastly painted
- ready), but the Dark Tentacles made me really think. I am a fan of
the Undermountain modules since the original one (Ruins of
Undermountain) and the Dark Tentacles were always part of the setting.
The version in Halls of Undermountain allows it to be encountered
ashore, which I like because it makes it more "accessible". So I decided
that your artwork should be the basis of the miniature to be created. I
got a printable version from your website, printed it and discussed how
to proceed with my friend Hilko, who works with miniatures as long as I
am a Dungeon Master. In the end we decided that we would put a
polystyrene "body" (about as large as a thumb) on a large base and add
tentacles. Lots. Of. Tentacles.

Warhammer 40K to the rescue. A
single Chaos Space Marine Spawn bit has 33 tentacles, which I glued to
the body. This was not as easy as it sounds, because polystyrene and
plastic needs quite some time until the glue dries. After that chore it
began to look like there was a Dark Tentacle somewhere in it. Hilko
added a leather cord for additional tentacly feeling. This is the one
thing which we would do differently if we made a second miniature: we
would use more leather cords and probably even leave out the polystyrol
body altogether (using tightly wound cords instead).

Hilko
painted the miniature with a gray base, added purple for the tentacles
and liberally applied Games Workshop washes. For the eyes, he put paste
(not sure about the word, the German word is "Leim") on the tentacles to
create round protrusions. These he painted as seen on your artwork.

I
asked the photographer of my company to make some better pictures for
you. He applied a little bit of photoshop because he was not satisfied
with the lighting, being winter and all."

Thank again to Jan and Hilko for sharing their awesome miniature with me and honoring me with choosing one of my monsters to create! I will leave you today with the art of the Darktentacle...

In my talk at Illuxcon I briefly touched on the subject of abstraction. Namely my frustration with my classmates in college who woke up one morning at the age of 22 and decided they were abstract expressionist painters. What are you abstracting? You don't know how to draw or paint, so how can you possibly be abstracting from anything? This line of discussion went along with Jon pointing out that mistakes and short comings in your work are not a STYLE. Explaining away by anatomy or perspective as you STYLE is NOT acceptable or any kind of justification. Bad anatomy is BAD ANATOMY.

This all leads back to this drawing. I lead toward big hulking humanoid forms. I just like them. Big upper body, long arms and most of the time short legs. If given half a chance I will push my humanoid monsters into this general body structure. ...This STYLIZATION of the human form. When doing thing with something that is human, for me at least it is a very fine line of where it works and where it does not. For monsters, I find that window of what works if a lot bigger, BUT it is not without boarders. An aspect of these studies to to feel out what works for my monsters, and what sort of results are created when you push or pull anatomy in different ways. Are the long arms too long or not long enough? What if they were a LOT longer? What if the legs were a LOT shorter? Does it matter that it is reptilian versus mammalian or avian? All things to take into account and to think about and to experiment with.

I am also continuing to look at and to work with different combinations of layers of attire and armor. What works and what looks good to create a believable and interesting collection of forms and shapes of armor and costuming. The abstraction of armor is as difficult a challenge as abstracting anatomy, but that discussion will have to wait for another day when I feel a little more comfortable with my own skill set.

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Back in Novemeber I brought you my fourth traditional painting, the Chimera.
Today I have for you the process progression of the painting. Point and laugh or look and learn, either is appropriate and I
will not judge.

As mentioned countless times before, all my paintings, it all started with a drawing. This particular drawing was done way back in May of 2010. This is a good/bad situation. Good that I am finally making time to complete the painting, bad that it is a 2.5 year old drawing and that there are parts I would do differently now. But I set ground rules down for myself in this most personal of projects, and one is that once the drawing is completed the design stands as it is. This does not mean I will not tweak stuff in the paint! Let's have a look at the drawing again...

Again, I was working in acrylics on a 9 x 12 board for this painting. I took photos about every hour or there about so that you can see the piece come together. I really wanted a third traditional piece to take with me to Illuxcon. I had the Bugbear that I finished back in January and the Deep One I had recently finished, but I was giving the Deep One away and really felt I needed something in addition at my table in the Showcase. I made the time in my schedule to get this piece done and was able to do it with time to spare. I was worried about getting it done and then having time to varnish it and to let it cure. I had visions of varnishing it my hotel room in Altoona... which would not have been an enjoyable experience. In the grand scheme of things it was also a test for myself. Could I get a traditional painting done, under pressure and under a deadline... you know... for if I find myself needing to have to make a traditional painting for some sort of deadline. Here is the Chimera coming
together...

Chimera steps 1 - 6

Chimera steps 7 - 12

I made it through that horrible patch that feels like the painting is flying out of control and was able to steer the image over the finish line. Even though I was racing through this one to make my deadlines I did feel like I had control over it and learned a lot from the process. It is the little things that add to the whole that I enjoy realizing and seeing work. I am still learning a lot about what it takes to get things to look a certain way, about readability, and how little or how much is enough. It is still a brave new world for all my painting, but for now, the traditional end of things offers me a huge amount of opportunity for education and growth. Here is the final Chimera one last time to see how it turned out...

Monday, December 3, 2012

I am a little behind in posting this, but you should really head over and listen to the most recent episode of the Ninja Mountain Podcast, episode 118. You will hear all the usual Ninja Mountain audio gold that you have come to expect from them as well as some third party impressions of the talk that Jon Schindehette and I did at Illuxcon. Here real proof that I was not making the while thing up and that I may possibly done a horrible job of speaking to a room full of people.

Be sure to run on over and give a listen to the most recent episode of the Ninja Mountain Podcast! It is well worth your time and you just might learn a thing or two about making forts and being a better illustrator. RAWR!

That is all for another exciting Monday on the blog, see you back here on Wednesday! Until then...

Friday, November 30, 2012

I have for you another drawing that is fresh from the drawing table.
This time around it is a Homunculus! "H" is still going strong, but there was something about the Homunculus that caught my eye. The science of the D&D world has always been a strange mix of magic and alchemy where anything was possible, which means the Homunculus will be right at home and could be just about anything. I present to you my version of a Homunculus…

Historically, the Homunculus is described as a small man shaped object that is embedded with certain human qualities through alchemical rituals... or specifically, magic makes the little man sculpture work. In the D&D universe this has depicted as a small humanoid creature sometimes with wings that is usually made out of a clay like material and does the will of its creator. What if we take that a step further, what if there was a part of a man... say a heart, a brain... or his soul, locked inside a vessel, combined with magic and alchemy to creature the Homunculus? Imagine entering the tower of some some mad wizard (it is always the fault of those damn mad wizards) and you see dozens and dozens of these things running around, doing tasks, maintaining experiments, even the watchful obedient servant and you knew that inside each one was a body part or soul of some hapless person...

About Me

I began my career designing special makeup effect for movies and television. Some of the television shows I worked on including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Firefly.

Currently I work in the gaming industry illustrating and designing monsters. I have done work with
Wizards of the Coast, Fantasy Flight Games, Paizo Publishing, Privateer Press, and AEG (just to name a few) on various book, card and miniature gaming products.